dossier
19/3/2001MORETTI
[by Stefano Stefanutto Rosa] Nanni Moretti’s latest film, My Son’s room seems to have everyone, or almost, singing the praises of his new-found maturity. Film critics and social commentators alike writing in the pages of publications as different from one another as La Repubblica, Il Giornale and Il Manifesto have dedicated column inches and even part of their front pages as they fall over themselves to find new words of praise for Moretti. My Son’s Room is a film that dismantles the widely-held theory that wanted Moretti capable only of making films that were narcissist, egocentric and ideological generational. This extraordinary examination of pain and death is the proof of Moretti’s having undergone a radical metamorphosis and finally gained maturity – not least because does not have two of his favourite and ubiquitous themes: politics and the left wing.
Writing in La Stampa, Lietta Tornabuoni calls it “a private, inward-looking film that is extremely dramatic. It has no comedy, politics or irony. Tullio Kezich in Corriere della Sera writes Moretti went from “the diary form to the novel form without losing any of his typical mordancy; indeed he manages to exploit a new maturity". In Repubblica, Natalia Aspesi writes about “This, the ninth film of a former boy who has become a husband and father. A film by a secretive mature and difficult man."
Sauro Borelli calls it “cinema that has come of age and become completely mature" whilst according to Roberto Silvestri it is a “beautiful and disturbing film that always gets you unawares. It is an unfashionable, merciless and bold film that draws you in and traps you in precisely the same way as so many of those treacherous “American" films that Moretti so loves to hate".
On the tail of so much praise, Aspesi gives something of a Freudian interpretation to this film when she compares “the son’s death symbolizing the adult Moretti having finally managed to free himself from his adolescence – albeit with great personal suffering." Kezich puts his money on the film receiving a Golden Palm at Cannes this year.
Apart from the panning it received from “Il Foglio" only two other critics dared voice their opposition to My Son’s Room. They were Michele Serra, one of Moretti’s staunchest supporters and Goffredo Fofi who has always detested him. Serra is the author of a surprising editorial in la Repubblica) entitled “My generation in tears", dismantles piece by piece all the “media gushing about Moretti’s presumed turning point... A film that does not distance itself all that much from the pain-saturated satire of his twenties nor from his dark and maniacal search for the sense of life. This is the reason those who love him, adore him and those who hate him, detest him." According to predictable opinion of Goffredo Fofi this film celebrates the funeral of the Italian Left and finds Moretti heading off down that well-trodden path of “the immediacy of everything. Everything has already been said, done in a superficial way and remains strictly one-dimensional."
Alongside the questions that the film’s ending begs, a few people hazard a guess to the cinematographic or literary works that may have influenced My Son’s Room like the obsessive randomness of Sliding Doors , the almost untouchable fragility of Kieslowski and Don Siegel, the minimalism of Raymond Carver and the Ian McEwan of Children in Time.
In answer to why Ancona, a “small and quiet city" was chosen to represent such a great pain only Natalia Aspesi manages to come up with a sufficiently convincing explanation: “it is the city where Visconti would have wanted to film some of Obsession because he wrote that "Ancona is the saddest place I've ever seen."
